October the 7th, 2023, was a tragedy for Israel. The unprovoked assault by Hamas, marked by the murder and kidnapping of civilians, shocked the world.
In the early hours of that Sabbath morning, coinciding with the Jewish festival of Simchat Torah, over 3,000 rockets were fired from Gaza into Israeli towns and villages. Under the cover of the bombardment, around 2,000 Hamas militants breached the border fence at multiple points, invading more than twenty civilian communities and military outposts. They massacred entire families in their homes, slaughtered young people attending a music festival near Re’im, burned houses with residents inside, and took more than 240 hostages—including women, children, and the elderly—back into Gaza. Over 1,200 Israelis were killed in a single day, making it the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust. Hamas filmed and broadcast many of the killings themselves, celebrating them as religious victory. And I will save you the gruesome and graphic details of all that.
Yet what followed was equally revealing: as Israel sought to dismantle the terrorist infrastructure in Gaza, it was accused of genocide, child starvation, and cruelty. Once again, the Jewish state became the target of moral inversion: blamed for defending itself.
Such reactions are not new. They are echoes of an old hatred that has resurfaced in every generation. Israel’s enemies change names and languages, but the underlying hostility remains the same. The outrage following October 7th exposed how deeply antisemitism is embedded in Western consciousness. While Israel exercises restraint and precision to avoid civilian casualties, her critics amplify distorted narratives, reviving the oldest of all calumnies: the idea that Jews are inherently guilty.
This hatred, however, cannot be explained merely by politics or media bias. Its roots are theological. The world hates Israel because God loves her. The spiritual conflict surrounding Israel is not about borders or policies; it is about God’s faithfulness to His promises.
Israel chosen and opposed
From the beginning, Israel’s existence has testified to God’s covenant faithfulness. The Lord told Abraham, “I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse” (Gen 12:3). Israel was chosen to be the channel of blessing to the nations and, ultimately, the people through whom Messiah would come. Satan’s strategy, therefore, has always been to discredit or destroy the people through whom God’s purposes unfold.
Suitt explains that the world’s hatred of Israel is rooted in the cosmic rebellion against God Himself. To erase Israel would be to make God appear unfaithful — to prove that His promises can fail. From Pharaoh’s decree in Exodus to Haman’s plot in Esther, from Antiochus Epiphanes to Hitler, each attempt to annihilate the Jews carried the same spiritual logic: if the chosen people perish, then the covenant dies with them.
This explains why antisemitism, unlike other prejudices, is both irrational and persistent. It transcends culture, class, and ideology because it is ultimately spiritual. Behind every accusation lies the whisper of the serpent who, from the beginning, has sought to defame God’s character by targeting His chosen people.
How Christianity fuelled antisemitism
The tragic irony of history is that antisemitism found a powerful host within Christianity itself. The early Church gradually replaced its Jewish roots with a theology of supersessionism — the belief that the Church had replaced Israel in God’s plan. What began as a misunderstanding became, over centuries, a justification for contempt and persecution.
By the second century, theologians such as Melito of Sardis and Tertullian had charged the Jews with deicide — the killing of God. John Chrysostom later thundered from the pulpit that Jews were “devil-worshippers in the flesh.” Augustine taught that Jews were preserved in dispersion as witnesses to their rejection of Christ. Such teachings produced an image of the Jew as cursed and subhuman, paving the way for medieval restrictions and violence.
During the Middle Ages, Church councils codified discrimination: Jews were barred from office, forced into ghettos, and accused of ritual murder and host desecration (Langmuir, 1996; Stallard, 2020). Crusaders massacred Jewish communities on their way to the Holy Land. In Spain and France, entire populations were expelled.
The Reformation, though it reclaimed Scripture, did not escape the same error. Luther’s early sympathy for the Jews turned to venom when they did not convert. In On the Jews and Their Lies (1543), he urged the burning of synagogues and expulsion of Jewish people — words later echoed by Nazi propagandists. Catholic Europe enforced ghettoisation and forced conversions through papal decrees such as Cum nimis absurdum (1555). Even the Enlightenment, which claimed to free men from superstition, merely secularised the old hatred. Figures like Voltaire portrayed Jews as fanatical and corrupt, echoing the same tropes in rationalist language.
By the nineteenth century, antisemitism had evolved into racial theory. The Jew was no longer condemned for rejecting Christ, but for being biologically inferior — a race unworthy of belonging to the nation. When the Nazis rose to power, they inherited not a vacuum but two millennia of Christian prejudice. Luther’s writings were quoted at Nuremberg; centuries of sermons had already taught Europe to view the Jew as the eternal enemy.
From the Holocaust to anti-Zionism
The Holocaust did not end antisemitism; it transformed it. Open Jew-hatred became socially unacceptable, so the same sentiment adopted a new form: hostility to the Jewish state. As Holocaust scholar Robert Wistrich warned, anti-Zionism became “the world’s most acceptable form of antisemitism.”
The same motifs reappeared — collective guilt, moral inversion, and conspiracy. The Jewish people were no longer accused of killing Christ but of oppressing others. Israel replaced the wandering Jew as the moral scapegoat of humanity. The charges were familiar: bloodshed, domination, deceit, greed — now applied to a nation rather than individuals.
This ideological mutation allowed Europe to feel absolved of its guilt. By condemning Israel, many could claim moral superiority while avoiding repentance for centuries of persecution. Anti-Zionism thus functions as moral self-exoneration for societies still uneasy with their past.
Christian Palestinianism and the revival of supersessionism
In recent decades, a theological movement known as Christian Palestinianism has gained traction. It reframes the conflict in liberationist terms, presenting Palestinians as Christ-figures and Israel as the new Rome. In this narrative, Jesus is re-imagined as a Palestinian freedom fighter, and the Jewish state becomes a symbol of oppression.
This movement borrows heavily from Critical Theory and post-colonial rhetoric. It divides humanity into oppressors and oppressed, casting Jews in the former category. This mirrors the supersessionism of the early Church — the claim that God’s covenant with Israel has expired. The logic is the same: the Jewish people are again portrayed as guilty, powerful, and morally obsolete.
Documents such as Zionism Unsettled (Presbyterian Church, USA, 2014) openly characterise Zionism as a heresy, while some Palestinian theologians equate the Israeli state with Pharaoh or Babylon (Quer, 2019). This theology, cloaked in compassion, denies God’s ongoing covenant with Israel and provides a moral framework for Christian participation in anti-Israel activism.
It is deeply concerning to see professing believers joining pro-Palestine protests, chanting slogans that originate in movements calling for Israel’s destruction. These Christians are often unaware that they have adopted an ideology rooted not in Scripture but in secular political theories that reinterpret sin and justice through the lens of power. Jesus warned that no one can serve two masters (Matt 6:24). Yet many serve the world’s ideological systems while imagining they serve God.
A spiritual diagnosis
The hostility toward Israel today cannot be understood apart from the unseen spiritual conflict described in Scripture. Revelation 12 depicts a dragon — Satan — waging war against the woman who gave birth to the Messiah. Throughout history, that woman represents Israel. The hatred directed at the Jewish people is thus an extension of Satan’s rebellion against God’s plan of redemption.
Modern antisemitism, including its political forms, is therefore not merely human prejudice but spiritual warfare. The devil knows that Israel’s survival testifies to God’s faithfulness. Every time a rocket is fired at Jerusalem, it symbolically targets the promises of God. Yet those promises remain unbroken. Against every empire that sought her destruction, Israel still stands.
Christians who understand the prophetic Scriptures should not be surprised. Zechariah foresaw a day when all nations would gather against Jerusalem, yet God Himself would defend her (Zech 12:3-9). The rebirth of Israel in 1948, after the ashes of the Holocaust, is not a coincidence but a sign that God’s word endures.
Standing with God’s covenant
To support Israel’s right to exist is not blind nationalism; it is theological consistency. It means recognising that God’s gifts and calling are irrevocable (Rom 11:29). The Jewish people remain beloved for the sake of the patriarchs, and their restoration will one day magnify God’s mercy to all.
The Lord Jesus Himself said, “You will not see Me again until you say, ‘Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord’” (Matt 23:39). The Second Coming is therefore contingent upon Israel’s national repentance and recognition of Jesus as the Messiah, which will take place in the land (Zech 12:10). Satan’s opposition to Israel is ultimately an attempt to prevent that moment, for when Israel believes, the King will return.
This does not mean approving every political decision, but it does mean rejecting the moral inversion that paints Israel as evil for surviving. The Christian’s role is not to flatter the world’s ideologies but to stand with God’s revealed purposes.
The resurgence of antisemitism in the West — from synagogue attacks in Manchester to university protests chanting for Israel’s destruction — shows that the ancient hatred has found new expression. The same spirit that whispered lies in the courts of Pilate and in the councils of medieval Europe now whispers through the language of “social justice” and “decolonisation.”
The Church must not be deceived. When they stand with God’s covenant people, they echo His promises. But when believers join in accusing Israel, they echo the accuser’s voice. To these, God says:
“Have you not observed what these people have asserted, saying, ‘The two families which the Lord chose, He has rejected them’? So they despise My people as no longer being a nation in their sight. This is what the Lord says: ‘If My covenant for day and night does not continue, and I have not established the fixed patterns of heaven and earth, then I would reject the descendants of Jacob and David My servant, so as not to take from his descendants rulers over the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But I will restore their fortunes and have mercy on them.’” — Jeremiah 33:24-26
The story of Israel is ultimately the story of God’s faithfulness. Every attempt to destroy her has failed, not because of political might, but because of divine sovereignty. As the Lord declared, “He who touches you touches the apple of My eye” (Zech 2:8).
References
- Barnes, C. (2021). They Conspire Against Your People: The European Churches and the Holocaust. King’s Divinity Press.
- Langmuir, G. (1996). Toward a Definition of Antisemitism. University of California Press.
- Quer, G. M. (2019). “Israel and Zionism in the Eyes of Palestinian Christian Theologians.” Religions, 10(8), 487.
- Stallard, M. (2020). “Social Justice, Anti-Semitism, and Anti-Zionism in Historical and Biblical Perspective.” Journal of Ministry and Theology, 24(2), 3–28.
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